Understanding and Implementing IDisposable Interface - A Beginner's Tutorial for Dot Net Developers

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the often confused topic of Implementing the IDisposable interface. We will try to see when should be need to implement the IDisposable interface and what is the right way of implementing it.

Background

Often in our application development we need to aquire some resources. These resources coould be files that we want to use from a clustered storage drive, database connections etc. The important thing to remember while using these resources is to release these resources once we are done with it.

C++ programmers are very well aware of the the concept of Resource Acquisition is Initialization(RAII). This programing idiom states that of an object want to use some resources then it is his responsibility to acquire the resource and release it. It should do so in normal conditions and in exceptional/error conditions too. This idiom is implemented very beautifully using constructors, destructors and exception handling mechanism.

Let us not digress and see how we can have a similar idiom in C# using IDisposable pattern.

Using the code

Before looking into the details of IDisposable interface let us see how we typically use the resources, or what are the best practices to use the resources. We should always acquire the resources assuming two things. One we could get the resource and use it successfully. secondly there could be some error/exception while acquiring the resource. So the resource acquisition and usage should always happen inside a try block. The resource release should always be in the finally block. As this finally block will be executed always. Let us see a small code snippet to understand a little better.

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